The volume of data being generated each day is increasing at a rapid pace, with each of us contributing to it. Sample this: Google alone processes more than 24 petabytes (1 petabyte =1015 bytes) of data each day, a thousand times more than all of the printed materials currently housed in the US Library of Congress.

Facebook has more than 10 million photos uploaded every hour; the number of messages on Twitter grows about 200% each year.

This is but some of the data Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger throw at you in their book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. Mayer-Schonberger, a professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, says that the book was the result of a casual conversation between him and Cukier, who is the Data Editor at The Economist.